


fix me, conflict me (i'll take anything)

by citadelofswords



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: COUNTER/Weight - Freeform, Character Study, Ignores Canon, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-05-05 08:58:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14614674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citadelofswords/pseuds/citadelofswords
Summary: No. He chose to walk away from the Odomas fleet. It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to come bring a little spark back into Augustus’s life. He needs to do it himself.(augustus foxwell, post odomas)





	fix me, conflict me (i'll take anything)

**Author's Note:**

> aiight listen my name in the artists and writers discord is "number one diego/augustus shipper" so i gotta live up to that title, right
> 
> this fic contains a TRULY ridiculous number of headcanons about augustus foxwell, since i was given nothing to work with except "mid-twenties" and "has a sister" so. also i'm still ignoring the finale in case you were wondering.
> 
> title from hurricane by panic! at the disco

Augustus helps take back Kalliope, and when he's done that he asks Captain Thorne for a ship back to Counterweight.

"You're welcome with us anytime," Hudson tells him, gruff, as he sees him off at the spaceport. "Just comm ahead."

"I will," Augustus says, with a respectful salute. "And if you need anything from me or from Counterweight, don't hesitate to reach out. I'll see what I can do."

He's older now, no longer the starry-eyed twenty-something filled with shrapnel who Diego Rose recruited with a gun to the head and an easy smile on his face. Almost thirty now, skin littered with scars and metal fillings and a cyberarm he's hacked and rehacked so many times the tech is near unrecognizable. Augustus Foxwell, Lieutenant of the Odomas Fleet, smiles at Hudson Thorne, and then turns onto his tiny shuttle and heads back to Counterweight.

He moves back in with his sister while he figures everything out. Valencia yells when she opens the door for him and then starts sobbing, and when Augustus pulls her into a hug she refuses to let go for two hours, until she's cried out and punched him three times and then made him a cup of tea that goes cold.

They build a pillow fort and curl up in it, and Augustus tells her the whole story— the recruitment and faking his death and rising through the ranks and getting homesick and losing half his family and taking back Kalliope, and then she tells him about her girlfriend and their engagement and getting the flower shop and their friends moving away and the sudden dissolution of Horizon and how much better Counterweight is with Executive Joie in charge, and they fall asleep like that and are found by her fiancée in the morning.

Augustus spends a week just being with Valencia, and on the eighth day he gets out of bed determined to start rebuilding his life from scratch and finds a package on Valencia's doorstep, filled with documents and identity cards and fingerprints, with a note in a scratchy handwriting. IN CASE YOU NEED TO DISAPPEAR, it says, and Augustus looks at the name and cries laughing.

But on the back of the note in all lowercase it says  _ congratulations on being alive again, champ _ , and Augustus hardly dares to believe what it means until he tries to get into his old apartment and his card works, greeting him with a cheery  _ Good morning, Augustus! _

His apartment is how he left it, minus the dead plants and the stray cat on the windowsill and the food in the fridge, and Augustus just stops and stares for a moment, dropping his bag on the floor in the doorway.

His first thought is that it doesn't feel much like home anymore, but he's sure it's just because he's not used to a room that will always have gravity, and won't have it be occasionally turned off while he sleeps. He's not used to permanence anymore. That's all. He'll be alright.

He starts working with Valencia for a while, and then her fiancée gets him a job working tech for the Herald. It's good. Nice. No danger that he's gonna get shot and killed, no need to go in a mech, no need to take his ship on a scouting mission. He tells people he fought Rigour when they ask about his scars (it's not technically a lie.) He doesn't mention the Fleet, or Hudson Thorne, or Diego Rose, however often he finds himself biting his tongue on some joke that won't make sense here.

He goes out for drinks with old friends and older flames. He kisses a few but every time he closes his eyes he remembers calloused hands slipping under his shirt and the sharpness of a smile as it turned away from him and he goes back to his lonely empty apartment and lies awake staring at the ceiling, trying and usually failing to resist the urge to message a frequency that’s probably not even used anymore.

"You haven't decorated much," Bentzen points out, when he comes over with a delivery from the shop. He straightens the arrangement out, blue dahlias and silver poppies and saffron for concern. "Needs a little more color around here."

Augustus hadn't really noticed, but now that he has he can't stop, but he also does nothing to fix it. Every day he passes little shops of prints and holos and knickknacks and he always stops in and never buys a thing. He doesn't buy plants except for the arrangements Valencia keeps sending; he presses the flowers between old books he's left dusty on his shelf and hangs the roses up to dry and he never unpacks that duffel bag.

He doesn't know what he's expecting to happen. Or that he's expecting anything, really. Not like Diego's gonna come out of the black and sweep him away after vanishing mid-coup, in the middle of what was meant to be the most important mission of his life. Or like he’s gonna get a call from Hudson asking him for the schematics of some new piece of tech, or to make him something important, or to troubleshoot something.

No. He chose to walk away from the Odomas fleet. It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to come bring a little spark back into Augustus’s life. He needs to do it himself.

But he doesn’t. His ship stays in the spaceport, he pays the cred they charge for another six months in the spot, and he keeps working. He gets a promotion; they put him in charge of cobbling together new tech the reporters can use. It’s his dream job; it’s what he’s always done on his spare time, even working for Horizon and on the Fleet. Diego had nudged him into telling the Captain about his hobby and he’d found himself being asked for repairs and tuneups and upgrades on a regular basis after. It had made him his first real friends, made him officially part of the family like he hadn’t been before. For the first time he’d felt like he was actually making a difference, was actually contributing something, instead of just being the turncoat who no one trusted.

He makes it another four months before he turns left instead of right on his way home and heads to the spaceport. He gets onto his ship, sits in the pilot’s seat, and pauses, hand running over the controls.

He almost did this once before. Almost took his ship off the Yersinia and ran away, tracker and mission and Diego’s giant gun to his head and everything else be damned. He wouldn’t have gone back to Horizon, would have just gone to Glimmer or Gemm or Sage or any other planet without Oricon influence, but he sat in the pilot’s seat and didn’t move until Diego came banging on the door and yelled at him to come get dinner before all the good stuff was gone.

Diego had had this way of showing up at exactly the right and wrong time, with Augustus not knowing whether he was grateful or disappointed until much later.

But he can’t. The wedding’s in three weeks, he can’t leave. And he’s got so much of Valencia’s life to catch up on, so much still he has to make up for. And ex-pirate or not, he’s not leaving his job without notice.

What the hell does he even think he’s doing, sitting in his ship like this? Where would he even go? Not to Kalliope, he doesn’t have enough fuel to make it there, and there’s nowhere else he’d really like to go. Nowhere else to go. He can’t drift around for the rest of his life just expecting something to happen.

No. He’s going to go home.

He stands up and heads down the ramp again and parked next to him is another ship, another  _ Odomas _ ship, and there’s Diego Rose, leaning against one of the supports for the exit ramp, frowning at his tablet.

The last time Augustus saw Diego, it was the night before they’d launched their invasion of Kalliope. They’d split a bottle of wine in an empty bay, looking up at the mechs towering above them. Diego had left his mask retracted but didn’t often meet Augustus’s eyes, directing his words up to the mechs.

“What are you going to do when we take Kalliope?” Augustus had asked, finally, because Diego had stopped talking about it, at some point, when it had become clear it was no longer a distant goal but in fact a swiftly approaching future. He’d stopped talking about the apartment and the cat and the cozy life of retirement and started talking about other things, ship repairs and tech and a silly rumor that Thorne had been secretly married for three decades, and come to think of it it had all stopped around the time Augustus had started referring to Odomas as his home and the fleet as his family, huh.

But Diego hadn’t replied, just looked sidelong at Augustus and wordlessly leaned over and rested his head on his shoulder, which was extremely out of character for him, and Augustus had been so surprised everything else he’d wanted to say had died on the tip of his tongue. And he hadn’t remembered until later that night, when Diego was kissing him against the door to his room like a dare and he’d asked again, and Diego had said “Don’t you worry your pretty head about it, sunflower,” and gone back to mouthing at his neck.

Now Diego is here, on Counterweight. Augustus blinks several times to make sure he’s not dreaming, but no, there he is, old leather jacket with the trails of roses peeking over his shoulders, mask glimmering against half his face. Augustus almost refuses to believe it, but the moment his boots hit the steps Diego looks up, startled for a moment before grinning, cheeky. “Knew that ship looked familiar,” he says, and Augustus shakes his head.

“What the hell,” he says. “What are you doing— where have you been?”

“Aw, didn’t know you cared,” Diego snarks, but slides his tablet into the pocket of his jacket and steps off the ramp. “I’ve been around. Heard your sister was getting married, and you didn’t invite me.”

Augustus colors, remembering  _ that _ particular series of messages. “How was I supposed to know you’d be in town?” he asks.

“Could have asked.”

“Would you have answered?” Augustus doesn’t wait for him to reply. “You left. Halfway through the mission, the most important mission, you just left.”

Diego doesn’t wince, but the lines around his jaw smooth out a little. “Realized I wasn’t quite as ready to stop as I thought I was,” he says, and,  _ oh _ . “Bureaucracy’s not really my style. I’m more of a ‘blow everyone up if they piss me off’ sorta guy. Thorne knew that. Maybe I’ll go back someday, see what it’s like now, what he’s done with the place.” He shrugs. “Not now, though. Too much still to see.”

Augustus is quiet. He’s not sure if he dares to say it, the thing he said in every single drunken message he left Diego, but his brain decides  _ to hell with it _ . “You left  _ me _ ,” he says.

“Didn’t know you were mine to leave,” Diego says, and folds his arms. And that’s… a good point. Everything about their relationship, the entire time Augustus was a part of the fleet, felt like a dance they were both trying to lead, a competition Augustus hadn’t known how to win. He’d never been sure if he’d wanted to. Now he wonders what would have been different if he’d let himself lose.

“You saved my life,” he says instead. “You made a job feel like having a purpose.”  _ You ruined me _ , he doesn’t say, but he thinks the way he shifts on the edge of the ramp to his ship and steadfastly refuses to look back at it is testament enough.

Diego seems to get it. He grins, all teeth. “Let’s run away,” he says. “After the wedding, you and me. Let’s go somewhere. Anywhere you want— I’ve been to almost all of ‘em, except Kalliope.”

“Where’s your favorite?” Augustus asks. It’s not a no. For his part, Diego steps close, slings an arm around his shoulders, drags him off the ship.

“I’ll tell you on the way,” he says. “Take me to your sister. I've been dying to meet her ever since you told me that story about her punching out your in-law at that party.”

They’re halfway to the apartment and halfway through some wild story about some pirates (“—sea pirates, Augustus, not our kind of pirates, and I was so drunk I forgot how to swim—”) when Augustus looks at Diego, walking next to him, and says, “It’s good to see you, Diego.”

Diego grins at him, something softer than usual, and leans over to press an obnoxious, smacking kiss to Augustus’s temple. “Good to see you too, champ,” he says, and it sounds genuine.

**Author's Note:**

> hm. maybe i'll write more of this. you can nudge me to do that or just come talk to me about the love of my life on twitter or tumbr @citadelofswords !


End file.
